BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins shrugged off a declining subscription base and said Blackberry is well-positioned for a profitable future.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

One swallow does not a summer make.

The old saying is a good guide for CEOS and other turnaround pros. Individual data points are not as important as a string of successes. The challenge is to keep focus and spirits high in spite of the prevailing talk.

Thorsten Heins has done noble work in taking the disaster that was RIM and salvaging the pieces and creating a potential masterpiece. The greatest success Blackberry can have is with the consumer... staying ahead with innovation and great user experience.

Wendy Lea: Behind Every Successful Person, There's a MentorWall Street JournalThey can help you untangle facts from feelings, people from the process, product from the market and the individual issues from the organization's structural issues.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Are you surrounding yourself with the support you need?

A very good short article that can help you understand the kind of mentor you may need. Wendy makes a distinction between the Coach and the Counselor. The coach provides feedback and tactical suggestions, while the counselor provides emotional support. Surrounding yourself with a few good resources gives every leader a better shot at success.

In our coaching work we often provide a coaching "team" - usually a pair of professionals and in it we often divide the roles of coach and counselor.

The self confidence and healthy ego required to lead at a top level is not without "downsides". Being blind to other ideas makes for decision making that requires lots of luck. Failure to adjust when more information arises can create a credibility problem for a leader refusing to budge in the face of facts. Here are a few good personal performance tips for leaders

Seek different perspectives; value contrarians.

Don't just value them...groom them. The care and feeding of different perspectives is the management equivilent of radar to a military force... the longer the view the better you can react.

Learn from mistakes.

Recently, I have made a personal resolution to improve my speed in "mistake learning". While I have understood the importance - I have often taken too long to adjust. I have learned that speed of adjustment is a critical factor in creating success.

Try this... Adopt a personal process plan from every important decision: PLAN - DO - DEBRIEF. Plan what you will do - make the best decision, Do - Get it done. DEBRIEF - Review and learn what worked? What didn't work? And certainly include others in the process.

Don't be too quick to simplify

I do believe in simplifying the world of work. However, getting to simple is sometimes a complex path. As a leader you are the manager of a system of systems. While yes you can make things too complex... you are more likey to err from ignoring the delicate balance of competing factors. It's like a game of Jenga - the person who see's the complexity of the blocks and keeps a steady hand usually wins

ABC NewsBehind Mark Sanford's turnaroundPoliticoSouth Carolinians may not love former Gov. Mark Sanford. They may still have a bad taste in their mouths after his governorship. They may even wonder whether they can entirely trust him.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Never Say Never.

Redemption is when followers think they now know everything about you... you have shown contrition. And you are too polarized to even think about voting for the other guy.. or in this case woman.

We attended Johnson's big presentation in January 2012, when he officially kicked off his turnaround strategy. He told a packed house that, "We can change a brand overnight. And we're going to do that starting 2.1.12." ...

Billy R Bennett's insight:

How did he do it? Not too difficult really...

Fail to recognize the customers you have.

Fail to communicate the strategy clearly to the customers you want

Decimate the middle ranks and refresh with people who have no connections to staff or strategy.

Telegraph.co.uk M&S boss Marc Bolland asks for time to turnaround clothing Telegraph.co.uk Mr Bolland said a recovery in M&S's clothing will happen “step by step”, playing down hopes that the new management team parachuted into revitalised the...

Supply Chain Disruption a Major Threat to Business Forbes Two important private sector priorities are the use of exercises to stress-test assumptions and plans, and the development of business continuity or trade resumption plans, protocols and...

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Finally! Attention is being paid to supply disruption...

Buried in the middle of the IT informaiton sharing is this...

Supply chain structures should be adaptable and agile so that they can quickly adjust and respond to market and economic conditions. Transparent organizational structures, including a clearly defined corporate structure and coordinated departments with clear responsibilities, can help reduce confusion and speed action if and when a disruptive event occurs.

Too much attention on IT often happens to provide an easy answer to the structure, agility and clarity requirements. This involves people. Most think IT solutions are easier... they are not, just easier to purchase.

Over the last few years we have placed intensive care teams into organizations addressing these very things. Our approach is to stabilize the unit with "teaching and coaching leaders". Helping people understand their purpose and experience winning is crucial. The results have always come faster than any IT solution. In fact, they are necessary for any IT solution to work.

The online version of the Philippines' leading business newspaper features virtually all the stories and statistical data available in the print edition.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Can coaching and development help?

In a study where 96 executives rated in the bottom 18% by their peers received specific coaching and development - 3 out or 4 were able to change their behavior enough that their colleagues could readily see improvement.

As you will hear us say - it is not just what you do but how you do it. Jack Zenger is one of the best when it comes to developing the right skills in the right way.

Here's what's likely to be behind the scenes... and what you can learn

Expect results by planning to measure - evaluate outcome. in this study they know what they have accomplished by evaluating before and afters.

Target help where it is needed. This was not a dip everyone in the same water solution. People who needed focused attention were given the individual help they needed.

Concentrate on behaviors that can be useful and seen by others as effective. It is not just important to do the right things - but to do the right things for the culture of the organization.

Need help with your performance issues? We have coaches with proven track records

CIC and Ogilvy Public Relations, China have teamed up again to jointly launch the white paper, “2012 Crisis Management in the Microblog Era,” which analyzed 50 Chinese brand crises in 2012 – concluding that brands ...

PROVO, UT--(Marketwire - Jan 8, 2013) - According to new research from the co-authors of the New York Times best-seller Change Anything, 43 percent of employees experienced a déjà vu performance review in 2012 -- negative performance...

Billy R Bennett's insight:

87 percent of employees leave a review discussion without a plan for how to better meet their managers expectations...87%! Hmmm. With that statistic I am surprised that only 43 percent claim that their performance reviews are repeats of the same negative performance.

But for others, the improvement is only temporary. That's why it is important to track performance and behavior over time. You can still use. ... She was placed on a performance improvement plan and did improve—temporarily.

"Connecting the data without connecting the people still promotes a siloed decision making approach focused at functional expertise. Unfortunately, in many cases the people do not want to be connected"

How true!

In the past few years we added an interesting service to our Organization Development business - Crisis intervention teams. Businesses had "centralized", "cost reduced", and "process optimized" themselves into near total dysfunction. Usually, centralized functions lost the ability to make decisions across funtions. The result in two major cases was a complete collapse of the ability to deliver. Why is that an OD opportunity? Because, it is a total organization failure. Leadership and collaboration must be rebuilt. Collaboration in the system must be structured. Emotions and unhealthy behaviors must be healed. We've found that injecting a skilled team of professionals (who already know how to work as an intervention team ) fill the void and provides leadership "life support" until sustainable solutions can be developed.

When the dysfunction reaches crisis - just getting people around the table is not enough - People see it as unnecessary and dangerous to share information. You must have effective leadership and expertise who know how to get alignment and agreement. These same leaders must manage "outside the room" to make sure everyone keeps commitments and shares informaiton until longer term solutions can be rebuilt.

Despite its popularity, the personality test has been subject to sustained criticism by professional psychologists for over three decades.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Duped? Perhaps. Profiling instruments are never accurate tools.... and perhaps the MBTI is the worst of the lot. However, the danger more often lies in the person delivering the feedback than in the instrument. And it is not just a lack of knowledge about the instrument - a good professional should have at least some psychometric education beyond any single instrument.

Every profiling tool should be given with a warning: this is not a prescriptive tool but a indicative tool. It is like using a weather vane for predicting the weather - it may tell you about wind direction at that moment, but it will not predict the hurricane next week.

The two owners of Amy's Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro took over the restaurant's Facebook page last night to fight unruly commenters, and man, was it embarrassing.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Businesses fail when they forget that the role of any business is to serve. Many businesses forget this at some time...rarely do you get a look at how badly they fail. This is a great example of epic failure!

in case you are not sure, this is how NOT to handle social media complaining.

By Billy Bennett Some leaders are not leaders at all. They are " Mis-Leaders ." HR leaders often know about managers who defy gravity... they are abusive and they suck the life out of people...

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Management Jerks - very difficult people in the workplace - should be classified as Mis-Leaders.

There have been interesting studies quantifying the costs. Here is a report on one of them. Coaching can yield results, so can education for the mis-leader and his or her team. However, if change does not come, then do not hide behind the "but he's so technically talented" excuse. The costs of the toxic mis-leader are far greater than peviously thought - now we know he or she can be contagious. Scary thought isn't it.

Management Jerks - very difficult people in the workplace - should be classified as Mis-Leaders.

There have been interesting studies quantifying the costs. Here is a report on one of them. Coaching can yield results, so can education for the mis-leader and his or her team. However, if change does not come, then do not hide behind the "but he's so technically talented" excuse.

The costs of the toxic mis-leader are far greater than peviously thought - now we know he or she can be contagious. Scary thought isn't it.

JC Penney looks to old CEO to secure its futureMyFox PhoenixDespite improvements, it's not surprising that passengers are getting grumpier. Carriers shrink the size of seats in order to stuff more people into planes.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins shrugged off a declining subscription base and said Blackberry is well-positioned for a profitable future.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

One swallow does not a summer make.

The old saying is a good guide for CEOS and other turnaround pros. Individual data points are not as important as a string of successes. The challenge is to keep focus and spirits high in spite of the prevailing talk.

Thorsten Heins has done noble work in taking the disaster that was RIM and salvaging the pieces and creating a potential masterpiece. The greatest success Blackberry can have is with the consumer... staying ahead with innovation and great user experience.

The global elite have again descended on Davos for their yearly pundit-fest. Prognostications have been made, as have commitments to save the world, end poverty, and clean up the environment.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

I hate the original title to this article. It may lead to a dangerous assumption that all "consulting" may be the same.

This was a study by the World Bank and Stanford researchers testing the impact of management technology

Here is what I agree with...

Success is built with clairty of purpose, roles and assignments - and systems/procedures to manage production. Sometimes things are very difficult to change without external help. Systems can be so chaotic - for good and bad reasons - rapid growth or gross inattention. Either way difficulty seeing means difficulty doing. When people are drowning, telling them to swim faster is not helping.That's when externals - with experience and fresh eyes can play jump in to help. However it's not any experience - there must also be experience at getting out of difficult situations and skill at helping people to fish for themselves.

Talent - know how - is unevenly distributed around the world. Even within top rated countries. However, the full understanding is worse than that. Some top rated countries have talent problems due past to focus more on financial dealing than building productivity...or resolving the productivity issue with poorly implemented technology. A generation of leaders who grew up in that period may not have receieved the benefit of experience in "making things better" and aligning people to work. When seeking external help make sure the people helping have the right experience for your situation.

Experienced external talent can help people create their own systems and behaviors producing real results. In our experience, much more than the 20% return mentioned in the article.

From the comments, you see what I expected to be the reaction to the article... skepticism based upon the experience of bad companies with bad external help.

We built our business on being external help (notice I avoid the C word) to fill the gaps many organizations missed in their development... or were not ready to build. By bringing experience from top companies and tested practices we could bring hope, alignment and engagement to struggling companies...or accelerate success in healthy ones.

The research team found little difference in participation levels between the two cohorts for a variety of activities, including performance measurement, working to improve processes or systems of care, monitoring sustainability ...

Billy R Bennett's insight:

We seem to talk a good game when it comes to participation of front line staff - however this study of nurses seems to question whether we are doing much more than talking. In a pair of studies it seems that there has been little difference in nurse participation in quality improvement initiatives in the past decade.

Dr. Kanter offers a very healthy "rant" about the state of leadership when it comes to fostering innovation. I certainly agree. However you ccould apply the same ...or similar... Thoughts to "engagement", "alignment" or most of the initiative like approaches today. This isn't new but it has reached a point where significant soul searching must happen for some leaders.

To be successful for the long haul you must be able to build a work environment that fosters an adaptive response to its environment. It must be good at innovation and process rebuilding in balance. What does tha mean? First it means finding and developing people to serve customers first. Poor innovation and bad process always hurt customers. While this is not in Dr. Kanter's list it is both the cause and solution.

Related Posts:Agile: From the Business Analysts’ perspectiveUser Documentation in an Agile Development EnvironmentRequirements Elicitation – Important QuestionsSelection of right Code Analyzer tools to build first time rightAgile development is not...

This article by Anil Giri addresses a problem SCRUM practictioners have experienced: A "too large" and "too distributed" team. However, rather than allowing the team to fail by stopping the project he suggests ways to work around the challenges and considerations to make next time.

I like Anil's approach for a few reasons - first he's right. I say that not from experience, but also from the best team research. Co-location is the term for putting people in the same physical space to work as a team. In a previous article I noted the necessity of team members needing to build skills in a co-located team before doing too much work in virtual - remote member - project teams.

Here are some other lessons he offers that can be adapted for any team based challenge:

Restructure the teams to form relatively smaller teams so daily scrum meetings can be completed in 10-15 minutes.My Note: This logic applies to any team. The sweet spot for the most effective work has been shown to be in the 6-8 member team. More than that and interaction becomes to complex, and individuals can retreat from work too easily.

Introduce one facilitator for every team for on-the-spot resolution of queries(the facilitator has business knowledge and development background). This person may have to facilitate multiple teams, as the facilitator doesn’t do actual development - My Note: Most businesses fail to use facilitators effectively - they confuse them with trainers rather than process guides who keep things on track and works through roadblocks. Speed and focus increases.

Facilitator re-orders the priority of defects in sprint on a daily basis - My Note:Some pre-staging of issues helps teams to hit the ground running on key projects. While there can be time-outs for larger group discussions, most of the time these can be quickly identified for them and their agreement.

Introduce daily open office meeting with architects and product owners to discuss big impact issues/show stopper issues.My Note:These are issues which could not be resolved by the facilitator or support people. "Anybody can join this meeting and raise a concern." In a standard work environment this is the purpose of some Daily Operating System meeting. Wins are aknowledged but assessing and assigning losses and barrier removal are the purpose.

Do you have a team challenge that you would like to be a focus of an article or blog response? Leave a comment or email me at Billy@pyramidodi.com

This article by Anil Giri addresses a problem SCRUM practictioners have experienced: A "too large" and "too distributed" team. However, rather than allowing the team to fail by stopping the project he suggests ways to work around the challenges and considerations to make next time.

I like Anil's approach for a few reasons - first he's right. I say that not from experience, but also from the best team research. Co-location is the term for putting people in the same physical space to work as a team. In a previous article I noted the necessity of team members needing to build skills in a co-located team before doing too much work in virtual - remote member - project teams.

Here are some other lessons he offers that can be adapted for any team based challenge:

Restructure the teams to form relatively smaller teams so daily scrum meetings can be completed in 10-15 minutes.My Note: This logic applies to any team. The sweet spot for the most effective work has been shown to be in the 6-8 member team. More than that and interaction becomes to complex, and individuals can retreat from work too easily.Introduce one facilitator for every team for on-the-spot resolution of queries(the facilitator has business knowledge and development background). This person may have to facilitate multiple teams, as the facilitator doesn’t do actual development - My Note: Most businesses fail to use facilitators effectively - they confuse the with trainers rather than process guides who keep things on track and works through roadblocks. Speed and focus increases. Facilitator re-orders the priority of defects in sprint on a daily basis - My Note:Some pre-staging of issues helps teams to hit the ground running on key projects. While there can be time-outs for larger group discussions, most of the time these can be quickly identified for them and their agreement.Introduce daily open office meeting with architects and product owners to discuss big impact issues/show stopper issues.My Note:These are issues which could not be resolved by the facilitator or support people. "Anybody can join this meeting and raise a concern." In a standard work environment this is the purpose of some Daily Operating System meeting. Wins are aknowledged but assessing and assigning losses and barrier removal are the purpose.

Do you have a team challenge that you would like to be a focus of an article or blog response? Leave a comment or email me at Billy@pyramidodi.com

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